As a member of the NCAA Division I board of directors, Rice University president David Leebron is working with a steering committee that could have a major financial impact on major college athletics at a time when dollars are hard-won and competition is high.

The committee of which Leebron is a member hopes by next month to suggest NCAA governance changes that could include more authority for the five major Division I conferences – the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern – to implement benefits and other rules changes benefiting student-athletes without a vote by all Division I schools.

As one of the smallest schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision, Rice could be hard-pressed to match investments made and benefits offered by the likes of Texas and Texas A&M.

That inability, however, is no reason to prevent larger schools from spending money on student-athletes rather than coaches or buildings, he said.

Leebron recently discussed the issue with Chronicle staff writer David Barron. Here are excerpts from their conversation.

Who will participate: “There will be a strongly enhanced role for athletic directors. The presidents feel comfortable in trusting a lot of this to the athletic directors broadly, because that is what we do on a daily basis … long with roles for senior women’s administrators and faculty athletic representatives.

“The committee has overlooked a formal, explicit role for students. I don’t think that is because we rejected it. We just hadn’t addressed it. I don’t foresee us coming out with a proposal that doesn’t include students in a formal role.”

On the committee’s goals for “big five” autonomy: “The goal is to define categories. It’s not to say we give you permission to have a $2,000 stipend, and it’s not to say we give you permission to interpret the principles of student welfare. There is something in between that provides clear guidance and limits as to what can be done so that it’s not a strait jacket and every time you want to do something a little bit different you have to come back to the Division I board.”

On potential limits of autonomy: “Some folks have been clear they while they will support full cost of attendance, they will not support a change in the number of scholarships. That does not affect student-athlete welfare except in the most ephemeral sense, but full cost of attendance does. Lifelong educational opportunity does. The ability to have your family participate in your college experiences does, I think that is where the dividing line is going to be.”

On his goals for the NCAA: “We try to create an environment that the American public likes in which a small school like Rice can win the World Series or a school like Boise State can come out of nowhere and be successful or a school can show up in the Final Four (of the NCAA Tournament). These are the things that make intercollegiate athletics interesting for people.”

On his goals for Rice athletics: “We all want the outcome to attract athletes who have ambitions of great success … especially if those ambitions are not to be professional sports players. We want to bring people to Rice who want to compete at the highest level, but their ambition is to be an engineer or doctor. My ambition is not to be a feeder to the major pro sports teams. We will have some. But that does not define our program’s success.”

On athletics spending at Rice: “We generously support intercollegiate athletics, but we have a lot of things we support. We support our music students who just played at Carnegie Hall. One thing I say about Rice is that only one rule applies to every part of the university, and it is that everything must lose money. We are very good at it. The exception is the endowment.

“We have all of these things for students and faculty, and they are all losing money, and the question at the end of the day is how are we going to allocate a limited amount of resources to support each of these activities? If we are going to devote more resources to athletics, it needs to come from revenue that athletics produces.”

On college spending priorities: “You have a bunch of colleges paying coaches $5 million a year and paying offensive and defensive coordinators more than most of us pay our head coaches. You have facilities that are how one might put it, luxurious. So there are a range of things that are now unregulated, many of which, in my view, reflect bad judgment. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to legislate against every form of bad judgment.”

On whether college sports should offer a “level playing field:” “If you’re somebody whose aspiration is to be a professional athlete, you don’t have the same opportunity at schools within each conference that you would have going to Georgia or Florida or Oregon or wherever.”

On future NCAA reforms: “I would like to see more acknowledgment that this is kind of an endeavor shared by all of the participants in college athletic athletics. That is not on the table right now.

“We have ended up with a model that is less collaborative and cooperative than professional sports in many instances. We should be asking ourselves these very fundamental questions about how we want to characterize this as a collective endeavor. How revenues are shared and are there limited ways in which revenues are not shared, that is not part of this governance discussion. Whether that discussion will occur in a different form, I can’t say.”

For more coverage on the changes in college athletics check out the Chronicle’s collection of stories here: